Institute for Progress (IFP) — September 2023 Update
Hello!
In case you missed it, a major announcement: the National Science Foundation is partnering with IFP to design and execute experiments to explore how the agency funds and supports research and innovation. We will consult with NSF on the current funding mechanisms and review processes used by the agency to decide which proposals to award, and recommend tests for different ways to fund high-risk and high-reward proposals.
Here’s what else we’ve been tackling this month:
✍️ Published Work
Co-founder Alec Stapp, Infrastructure Fellow Aidan Mackenzie, and Arnab Datta laid out a potential deal Congress can strike on permitting reform.
“A grand bargain, in which Democrats secure meaningful transmission reform and Republicans obtain meaningful reforms to judicial review, would have genuine bipartisan appeal: reforms to interregional transmission will promote energy security and reliability, while balanced reforms to judicial review will accelerate clean energy deployment.”
🎤 Interviews & Events
Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter joined The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson to discuss why it’s so expensive to build things in America.
“At a very high level, it’s basically a case of we’ve steadily made it more and more difficult to build things in the U.S. with rules and regulations, and have not had commensurate technology and productivity increases that have been able to offset that.”
Several IFP team members based outside of Washington, DC were in town last week, so we hosted a happy hour at Red Bear Brewery — thanks to everyone who was able to make it!
📰 Media
AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis gave our grand bargain a shoutout in his newsletter Faster, Please!
“Oh, and by the way, Aidan Mackenzie, Arnab Datta and Alec Stapp at the Institute for Progress just released a super-interesting proposal, ‘A Grand Bargain for Permitting Reform.’ Broadly, Democrats would get reforms to both shorten siting and permitting timelines for large interregional transmission lines to accelerate renewable energy, while Republicans get judicial reforms to NEPA to limit legal obstruction, such as caps on injunctions against projects.”
Crain’s New York Business interviewed Aidan in a piece on the lawsuits over congestion pricing.
“Aidan Mackenzie, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, a Washington-based, non-partisan think tank, said lawsuits as a result of NEPA have become a ‘shadow over the whole process.’ Mackenzie said that such lawsuits can be born out of genuine concern over a project’s impact but may sometimes be employed for a sort of political theater… ‘The review for congestion pricing is already considerably longer than the average,’ he said, noting that it exceeds what’s required of the more exhaustive review the state is seeking. ‘So, are they really saying that they would have been fine with it if it was 5,000 pages or 6,000 pages? I really doubt it.’”
Vox cited work from Aidan on the future of geothermal.
“Geothermal drilling, unlike some oil and gas projects, is subject to challenge under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which can lead to years-long regulatory delays in getting projects off the ground. (Yes, you’ve read that right — it’s legally easier to permit an oil or gas well that will add further greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere than it is to drill geothermal wells that can provide near-zero-carbon electricity.)”
The World quoted Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld on visa waiver times.
“‘Wait times for visas across the board have exploded, partially because of COVID,” Neufeld said. ‘But they were also increasing before COVID-19.’ ... To make matters worse, Neufeld said, the US is lagging in its adoption of technology. ‘Our processing system is based on paper records, it's based on in-person interviews,’ he explained. ‘Our peer countries — Canada, the UK, Australia — have started to increase their experimentation with digital technology.’”
Heatmap used analysis from Brian to explain why building nuclear plants costs so much.
The vast majority of the costs of nuclear power come from the expense of building its generators, according to an analysis by Brian Potter.
The Bulletin wrote up a congressional staff delegation trip to the Bay Area led by Biosecurity Fellow Arielle D’Souza.
“The field trips were part of programs run by Stanford University and the Institute for Progress that bring policy makers — like these congressional staffers — to labs and university campuses and immerse them in the biosecurity issues they need to understand if they are to develop effective policy about, for instance, identifying when research has the possibility to make pathogens dangerous, or the development of US biomanufacturing and efforts to expand the resilience of our medical supply chain.”
Science|Business referenced Biosecurity Fellow Juan Cambeiro’s work on AI risks in biology.
“AI tools could have allowed Iraq to overcome the lack of technical expertise that limited its biological weapons programme, warns the Institute for Progress, a Washington DC based think tank, in a recent submission to help shape the US’s national AI strategy.”
🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter
🔭 Macroscience, by Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang
🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz
👋 Tweet for the Road
